I was lucky enough to meet Sarah Savioli at the Gavoi literary festival “L’Isola delle storie” which I attended with some reader friends. We didn’t know this author, she intrigued us and we went to the presentation of her latest book: “I selvatici”. I discovered that someone had written about me and my relationship with plants and animals without knowing me. Yes, because the protagonist of her books is not only called Anna, but she talks to plants and animals: something I have been doing regularly for over seventy years. My parents caught me talking to a ladybug when I was a year and a half old: they didn’t understand me perfectly yet, but the ladybug did.
But let’s get back to the protagonist of the four volumes: Anna Melissari is forty years old, she has a child, a husband, a cat and a ficus. Her life goes on like any other, except that, following a small cerebral hematoma, Anna begins to communicate with plants and animals. An extraordinary ability that, in addition to offering her a new perspective on the world, gives her an unexpected job: she becomes a collaborator of the team of the investigative agency of the gruff private investigator Cantoni, with whom she argues continuously, together with that “hundredweight man” Tonino and the harlequin Great Dane Otto, greedy for sweets and prone to flatulence.
Sarah Savioli’s fresh and lively writing, in the best tradition of our comedy and thanks to her long experience as a forensic technical-scientific expert, makes this superpower of the protagonist almost realistic and possible.
Pages: 272, Paperback | EAN: 9788807035463
In this latest adventure, she, the sweet Great Dane Otto, and the rough Cantoni are on a trip to the mountains of Ferlico, a small village in the Apennines where Cecilia and her husband Tullio have been running a shelter for twenty years that provides employment and hospitality to people fleeing war and desperation, while waiting for their right to asylum to be regularized. One night, Yasser, a young man from Syria, well-liked by everyone both in the shelter and in the village, disappears into thin air. The police believe it was a simple voluntary departure, but Cecilia is certain that the boy would never have left without giving explanations, so she entrusts the Cantoni Agency with the search. Anna will faint, overwhelmed by the intensity of the voices in the woods. Thanks to the help of Cantoni and the Great Dane Otto, who never abandon her, she finds new strategies to communicate with goats, hedgehogs, wild boars, squirrels, roe deer and with the vegetation that covers the mountains surrounding the shelter.
In short, a thriller that is a comedy about the living, about the effort that coexistence sometimes requires, but also about the splendid richness that only the encounter between differences can give.
Author: Anna Lacci is a scientific popularizer and expert in environmental education and sustainability and in territory teaching. She is the author of documentaries and naturalistic books, notebooks and interdisciplinary teaching aids, and multimedia information materials.
Translation by Maria Antonietta Sessa
